I can write music but I’m not much for words.

I prefer ordinary girls – you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with...

It’s hard to say how you get influenced by something. When you work on something for seven years, it’s bound to make an impression.

All real freedom springs from necessity, for it can be gained only through the exercise of the individual will, and that will can be roused to energetic action only by the force of necessity acting...

We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.

It doesn’t necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

School, I never truly got the knack of. I could never focus on things I didn’t want to learn.

I was blown away by the standing ovation. I’ve had tributes before, sure, but I don’t retain that feeling, and I wasn’t prepared for it on Tuesday. But maybe you shouldn’t retain these things or...

By the way, the point between rationality and what we would call the irrational is a very difficult point to establish. There’s no specific line, as you know.

To the person that deals in visualizations, I suppose there is something rather exciting about a whole set of people – they all going symmetrically, up or down, in a military sort of precision.

I couldn’t deal with playing a character who rides motorcycles and has a leather jacket and is a tough kid, y’know?

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

I’m interested in producing a work of art, and unless I hear the thing thoroughly, I would have no reason to put it down at all.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing all the hype that’s written about you… Who knows? In a couple of years, you might find me in the loony bin!

I thought if I could get television interested in opera, it would make a kind of new thing that would allow composers to build a whole new repertoire.

Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

Ummm, reach for the stars and keeps your hands on the ground? Something like that? I guess you would end up with your arse in the air.

If you can do what you do best and be happy, you’re further along in life than most people.

I’d met Dr Dre, he was thinking about his next album, we talked a little and he said, ‘Let me give you some of these loops and see what you come up with’.

Every time I’m a bit surprised always, what the patterns look like and what the whole thing looks like because, of course, I primarily hear.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he’s actually trying to create his own language.

I just want to keep doing what I’m doing and hopefully people will watch my movies.